Time isn’t holding us, time isn’t after us
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was. – David Byrne, “Once In a Lifetime”
Metaphors are at best imperfect; no matter how alike two things are, there are bound to be some differences. The same thing goes for historical cycles; no two eras can be exactly the same. That having been said, there are so many parallels between our era and the Victorian that it’s positively eerie; as I said in my New Year’s Day column,
…a coalition of conservative Christians and small-minded, narcissistic, middle-class white “feminists” has succeeded in selling its ideas of social engineering to the society at large, resulting in an ever-increasing mountain of restrictions on private “vices” such as sex and drug use. Once again we are being told that sex is “harmful”, especially to “children” (meaning anyone under 21), that prostitutes are the mentally defective “victims” of evil men, that there is a secret international conspiracy to sell millions of women and children into sexual slavery to satisfy “sinful” male lusts, and that women are eternal, sexless Trilbys who require paternal protection from mustachioed male Svengalis. Once again white Westerners are being urged to take up the “White Man’s Burden” and work to shepherd the degraded, childlike brown races from their inferior state by forcing them to accept our vastly superior culture (for their own good, of course). And once again plain, honest language is avoided in favor of vague, polysyllabic euphemisms designed to hide meaning rather than convey it, as discussed in my column from last New Year’s Day.
Given all this it’s no surprise that anti-sex worker fanatics refer to themselves as “abolitionists” and like to fantasize that there are “more slaves now than at the height of the Atlantic slave trade”, or that they write in an overblown, lurid style drawn straight from the penny dreadfuls. Health fascists employ rhetoric one might expect from the likes of Sylvester Graham or John Harvey Kellogg, and then there’s snobbish, racist social engineering like the latest from New York:
…[Proposed]…legislation…would ban eating in the New York City subway system…[on the grounds] that [it] breeds rats. It’s far from clear that the proposed ban would be enforceable…[and] the claim that noshing leads to litter and filth harks back to racial and class stereotypes from the Victorian era…[when] social reformers tried to crack down on working-class public eaters and food vendors — many of whom were immigrants — by linking them to squalor, disease and shame. To 19th-century guardians of public morality, the newfangled habit of eating outside the home was a menace to body and soul. The oyster stalls of downtown Manhattan were an assault on the family values of the dinner table. The “hot-corn girls” who sold their wares on the streets were no better than prostitutes. Public eating was a gateway sin that led to drinking and debauchery.
As I pointed out in my column of one year ago today, the “gateway” argument is employed by lawheads to argue in favor of logically-unsupportable bans on consensual activity by claiming (without proof, of course) that the activity in question “leads” inevitably to serious consequences:
“Eating in public may beget a certain freedom of manner and nonchalance in little ladies and gentlemen,” Putnam’s magazine warned in 1853, “but we fear the practice is not calculated to promote the health either of the mind or the body.” For children, the magazine hinted darkly, eating in public was worse than unhealthy — it was bad for their morals. All this sermonizing about public morals was a euphemism for a more concrete threat: the growing populations of Irish, German, Italian and Jewish immigrants…for the families flooding into Ellis Island every day, street peddling was often the first step up the ladder of capitalism. Street food cost less than restaurant fare, because vendors didn’t have to pass on the already skyrocketing cost of rent to their customers…Well into the 20th century, social reformers lobbied the city to crack down on immigrant pushcart vendors…[arguing] that eating in public was “unhygienic” and led to diseases like cholera.
You can hear an echo of Victorian finger-wagging nowadays from lawmakers who pit public eating against cleanliness, godliness and that elusive quality we refer to as being “civilized”… but…in many of the great cities of the world, public eating and all of its glorious manifestations…are occasions for celebration and communion, not shame and punishment…To be sure, some foods…travel well [and] others…not so much. And some subway passengers do throw their leftovers on the…tracks. But instead of criminalizing a biological necessity like eating, we should enforce the already existing laws against littering…we don’t want to end up like Washington, where transit police officers, during an undercover crackdown in November 2000, infamously arrested and handcuffed a 12-year-old girl for eating French fries. (The officers who searched her book bag, according to the girl, asked if she had any drugs or alcohol in addition to her fries)…
Because, you know, French fries are a “gateway drug” which inevitably lead to shooting up heroin. Yes, that’s an absurd exaggeration, but to whores and our clients it sounds no more ridiculous than the common assertion that having sex with someone for practical reasons (rather than “love”) and being honest about one’s expectations up front, somehow inevitably leads to violent crime.
The idea that denying oneself physical pleasures, from sex to tasty food to chemical stimulants, is a good in and of itself arrived in North America with the Puritans and grew dramatically during the 19th century (as described in Warner’s All or Nothing). But the notion that it is somehow justifiable to impose one’s own personal beliefs or preferences on society as a whole is the deformed spawn of the Social Purity Era, and its reappearance is yet another symptom of Neo-Victorianism.
It reminds me of Fox News very own John Stossel’s news program entitled “Illegal Everything” a few weeks ago in late February. First, he showed us how ridiculous it was to set up a lemonade stand in New York City and other places around the USA because of all the laws and ridiculous enforcement of such laws. Then he moved on to video tapping or taking pictures of police officers in uniform and on duty. Then he moved on to the narcotics trade showing how narcotics use decreased among the youth and stayed the same overall in Portugal after legalization. Finally, John Stossel moved on to prostitution with the legal brothels of Nevada. The former district attorney was upset when the Nevada whores told her to leaved them alone saying noone has a legal right to harm oneself in the end. John Stossel asked if we really needed all these laws at the end of his news program.John Stossel understood the difference between true vice, the harm one causes to oneself, and true crime, the harm one causes to others. Do most Americans these days? The answer seems to be a resounding NO!!!
Actually there are more slaves now than at the height of the Atlantic slave trade. It’s called prison and it’s a lucrative business for those in charge and those who profit from the slave labor. Not so much for the taxpayers though.
Well-said, Stephen!
Stephen,
you missed fathers of divorce. Fathers of divorce are effectively slaves only no one cares to think about them…because…you know….they are only men…they are supposed to be slaves.
Sad thing is that in addition to prisoners, there are more slaves now then during the Atlantic slave trades because so many more billions of us are puttering about.
While there is some sex slavery going on, the cast majority of these slaves are simply not doing anything titillating enough to serve a rescue industry wet dream.
They are simply boring.
What with their boring forced and bonded labor in those boring mines, pits, factories, plantations, and fields. There is no story here. One simply can’t get civilized readers off with this tripe so why would we even waste the digital ink?
What’s this? There’s a 24 year old aspiring actress from Tennessee lost in California? She was missing and is now safe? Bless her soul! Her mommy was looking for her little girl this whole time? She says a mean ol’ pimp got her addicted to drugs and did bad stuff?! That’s CNN worthy shit right there!
*face palm*
/OT … Do we need to sign into your site to post now? I keep getting a gravatar error message telling me to sign in.
I’m not sure what that problem is about; Krulac, Hal 10000, Sailor Barsoom and my husband all had the same issue. I hope WordPress fixes it soon; it started I think Friday.
After logging in at Laura’s, and again here, I haven’t had another problem. It is annoying, but thankfully I only had to fix it once, not every time I want to post or something like that.
Americans … hell, probably other nationalities also, really can’t make the connection between prohibitionist laws that affect others – and the ones that eventually come along to affect themselves.
If they stopped and thought about this for maybe five minutes – they’d totally see how prohibitions against drugs and prostitution lead to prohibitions against eating in public. They understand the concept of the “slippery slope” … but don’t seem to understand that the best way not to “slip” is to stay off the damn slope altogether.
I find it hard to resist a snigger when I see Graham Crackers or Kellogg’s Corn Flakes — I’m reminded of why they were invented. At least Dr Bircher’s Müesli doesn’t have the same “hygienic” properties, though really a full Irish is the best start to the day 🙂
What I’m stupidly surprised by is how often the “gateway” argument turns out to be garbage. We’ve been told a bunch of lies about pot bein a gateway to hard drugs and porn being a gateway to rape and HPV being a gateway to promiscuity. These argument should never be taken at face value. If you’re to argue that something is a “gateway”, you’d better be a show me a God-damned fenced and breadcrumb trail.
At least the Victorian Era produced some of the best written porn ever, a huge number of prostitutes and brothels, and saw the popularisation of kinky sex, especially caning and other BDSM related fun. Oddly enough, lesbian sex was not suppressed, and many experts say there was a strong undercurrent of very hot woman on woman sex in all manner of “feminine” things such as fashion magazines and “How To” articles.
The Victorians were concerned with public propriety, but understood that what happened in private was usually nobody’s business. Even Queen Victoria was a great lover of nude paintings. She only became a gloomy guts after her husband died.
In Victorian London, there was even a regularly published guide to prostitutes, “Harris’s Guide to Covent Garden Ladies” complete with reviews and prices, which was legally and openly sold.
The alarming thing about the modern would-be Victorians, is that they want to control our private lives and even our thoughts as well. They view sex and other human pleasures as completely evil, and not merely things to be kept out of sight so as not to frighten the horses.
Maggie,
in another effort at stating the bleeding obvious and to paint women as complete morons….apparently Police need to issue warnings to women who do internet dating that some men are dangerous. How about that?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2117471/Police-issue-warning-internet-daters-woman-raped-beaten-man-met-online.html
Of course. It goes right next to the article about how women are signing up in droves in the UK to cheating web sites.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2117516/British-wives-driving-demand-extramarital-dating-websites.html
I promise. I am NOT the editor of the Daily Mail. Not in my wildest drug induced hallucinations could I make this rubbish up!
The Daily Mail is a rag which uses sex stories, however exaggerated or distorted, to sell ads. A good rule of thumb: if a story only appears in the Mail, it’s bullshit. They also forcibly “out” sex workers against their wills, which makes them the enemy of all sex workers and allies; if I need to link the Mail I use Freezepage so as to avoid giving them click-through revenue.
“The Daily Mail is a rag”
Very true.
Add the “environmentalist” to your “feminist” and Christian moralizer and we have a dark triad indeed.
Everywhere and at all times, someone who *knows better than you* is seeking to control your private life.
Not a very delightful state of affairs, is it?
Several things now are different from the Victorian era.
Along with the moralizing busy bodies, there were serious reformers, taking on real issues, like poverty, low wages, the rights of working people and women.
Events like the matchgirl strike at Bryant and May, and the Docker’s strike was the beginning of labor organization and resistance against the capitalists, and the struggle for decent working conditions and reasonable wages.
It was the beginning of the women’s right movement.
Prince Albert was serious about housing for the working classes in Great Britain.
Today, we have the opposite happening. We’ve cheap, shoddy built housing encouraged by crooked loan practices that few can afford.
The capitalists have been taking decent pay and working conditions away from workers for thirty years.
And the Republicans have launched a war on women.
Quite different.